Radcliffe Sponsors Conference To Discuss Women in History

About 800 woman historians are expected to arrive in Cambridge October 25-27 to attend the Second Berkshire Conference on the History of Women.

Hosted by Radcliffe, this will be the second year the conference will deal specifically with the history of women. The conference provides a forum for "the serious and meaningful work" that is currently being done in the field, Alberta Arthurs, dean of admissions, financial aid and women's education, said yesterday.

Scholarly papers will be presented in over 50 areas, including women in ancient Rome, labor organizing and women's consciousness, women in the third world, and a second look at Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex."

The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians is the oldest organization of its kind in the country. The group of women historians has been meeting at resorts in the Bershire Hills of Massachusetts since the late 20's.

The organization was founded by woman historians from eastern colleges as a response to their exclusion from their male colleagues' conferences.

The conference at Douglass College--the woman's college at Rutgers--in the spring of 1973 was the first time the conference convened solely to discuss the history of women.

This year's conference is jointly sponsored by the Office of Women's Education and the Schlesinger Library. Patricia King, a member of the Planning Committee, said that over 600 people have already registered and 200 to 300 more are anticipated.